By
On Top Magazine Staff
Published:
June 05, 2014

Author-columnist-activist Dan Savage
says progress has been made in how gays are portrayed in the media.

During an appearance on Ora.tv's
PoliticKING, Savage was asked: “Do you think [gays are]
portrayed well in the media?”

“You know, I used to debate this with
my friends in the ‘90s when Will and Grace – a sitcom
about a gay man and a straight woman who are friends – was on TV,”
he answered host Larry King. “And my gay friends would complain
that it wasn't a very realistic portrayal of gay people and I would
point out that Friends – which was another hit sitcom on
television at the same time – was not a really realistic portrayal
of straight people.”

“We shouldn't look to any one thing,
one image on television as definitive or debated as if it's the only
image we've ever seen on television. We used to have to have those
sorts of debates. Back in the day, Billy Crystal on Soap was
the only gay character on TV, so it was very fraught how he was
portrayed. And he was portrayed very badly in the end. He ended up
not being gay, as if gay was a choice that he could walk away from.”

“But now with Michael Sam, with
openly gay NBA basketball players, [Jason] Collins, with Mitch and
Cam [of Modern Family], with all of the wonderful queens on
RuPaul’s Drag Race, and media figures like Rachel Maddow and
Anderson Cooper, there's this multiplicity of portraits of LGBT
people in the media and on television in fiction and in reality.
And I think any individual one case is less important. It's just
part of a mosaic now and I think that's a wonderful example of
progress.” (The video is embedded on this page. Visit
our video library for more videos.)